Thorsten’s Recap of SAP TechEd 2012 Las Vegas

Right before leaving my hotel room and heading to the airport to fly back home to my sweet kids, I recorded an impromptu recap of my SAP TechEd 2012 Las Vegas experience. Try to ignore the post-TechEd cold sore. I clearly should have hired a make-up artist and a hairdresser, but I hope you’ll enjoy it nevertheless.

Marilyn’s written summary

The amazing Marilyn Pratt was so kind to summarize the main points – much more concisely than I was able to make them – for those who prefer reading to watching the video. (Thinking about it, the target group includes me, too. You get to determine your own speed, which is not easily possible with a video.) I copied her introduction and summary from the comment section into the blog post to make it easier to find. So, curtain up, clear the stage for Marilyn!

“One of the things I think about often on SCN is that we have multiple learning intelligences to accomodate. Some like to engage in Q&A in forums. Some consume blogs and read documents. Others enjoy podcasts and/or video blogs.

I took the liberty of summarizing some of what I consider your more salient points in the video. It helps me understand to “take notes”.

I’ll share them here and if I’ve misquoted or misunderstood any, please don’t hesitate to correct and revise.

Here we go:

Connecting the dots: you can’t reinvent the world all the time, there needs to be solidity in execution.

There is innovation but at a smaller level in granularity.

Continued focus on enabling the developer community to work with SAP stuff.

More and more offerings are being released for serious use. You can run HANA productively on Amazon Web Services for 99 cents an hour, humble but great start.

Big thing is always to get the political will, then the legal department and then breakthroughs happen.

SAP investing in User Experience – Demo of App designer that is template based and allows customer grade mobile experience. We also saw Visual Intelligence (exploring large amounts of data stored in HANA) like in BOBJ , there is an effort to make sense of data.

In HANA area, SAP is ready to release their app services engine . In the future in order to build HANA based applications from scratch, you are no longer limited to SQL coding and script. In past you would have needed a full-blown app server to build your applications in a secondary server.

Distinguished engineer program and HANA Academy. Looking to have those with HANA experience share that and have others benefit from that.

Experience HANA website will be expanded to include HANA Academy website.

Expect a separate blog on ABAP on HANA

The single biggest thing I forgot to mention in the recap is ABAP on HANA, because I’ve been working with SAP intensely on that topic for months so it wasn’t really new for me at TechEd – but it was an important TechEd topic and as SAP is unveiling their plans (and the non-disclosure agreements that have previously kept me from blogging lose their binding power as SAP makes the information publicly available), I shall blog about this separately! In the meantime, you might enjoy the SAP TechEd Live recording in which Graham Robinson interviews Thomas Jung and me on ABAP on HANA: http://www.sapvirtualevents.com/teched/sessiondetails.aspx?sId=3578

One of the things I think about often on SCN is that we have multiple learning intelligences to accomodate. Some like to engage in Q&A in forums. Some consume blogs and read documents. Others enjoy podcasts and/or video blogs.

I took the liberty of summarizing some of what I consider your more salient points in the video. It helps me understand to “take notes”.

I’ll share them here and if I’ve misquoted or misunderstood any, please don’t hesitate to correct and revise.

Here we go:

Connecting the dots: you can’t reinvent the world all the time, there needs to be solidity in execution.

There is innovation but at a smaller level in granularity.

Continued focus on enabling the developer community to work with SAP stuff.

More and more offerings are being released for serious use. You can run HANA productively on Amazon Web Services for 99 cents an hour, humble but great start.

Big thing is always to get the political will, then the legal department and then breakthroughs happen.

SAP investing in User Experience – Demo of App designer that is template based and allows customer grade mobile experience. We also saw Visual Intelligence (exploring large amounts of data stored in HANA) like in BOBJ , there is an effort to make sense of data.

In HANA area, SAP is ready to release their app services engine . In the future in order to build HANA based applications from scratch, you are no longer limited to SQL coding and script. In past you would have needed a full-blown app server to build your applications in a secondary server.

Distinguished engineer program and HANA Academy. Looking to have those with HANA experience share that and have others benefit from that.

Experience HANA website will be expanded to include HANA Academy website.

Thank you so much, Marilyn, for the written summary! It adds so much value. 🙂 I’ll take the liberty to copy this from the comment section into the actual blog post to make it easier to find for readers.

Thx for that Anne and I’ll add my personal shout out to Rocky Ongkowidjojo (Anne Hardy has one of the most inclusive and diverse teams in SAP- culture, gender, age….and I bet she has something to say about how inclusion drives innovation because she LIVES that credo) Each one of her folks, separately and together live a mentor/guide/model mission. They also inject fun and games and cartoon characters: see Mario Herger and Alvaro Tejada

And back to Thorsten, I personally loved the video format of the summary. For those of you who can access it, very well worth the 13 minutes. I learned to connect a great many dots by listening. While many of us were indeed waiting for momentous announcements, you so deftly noted that it is no less important to “solidify” and deepen those things that were yesterdays news flash. The real work is in the “experience”, the user experience and of course the developer experience. In fact the common denominator in Anne Hardy ‘s title and Sam Yen ‘s title is the word experience. In Anne’s case developer experience (which was very well felt in the clubhouse and sessions and license announcements) and user experience focus which Sam so eloquently spoke of during the Role of Empathy event.

Thorsten, this video media suits you well and for those not fortunate enough to chat with you in person, does bring a small and rich compensation. Can’t wait for more. See you in Madrid.

great job, my man! This was the first TechEd where we were both there the whole time and somehow did not manage to get together. Definitely better planning in Madrid!!!

I also liked the vidblog format, even though for a prolific writer like you it was somehow unusual, but rewarding. You looked a little tired, but no wonder 😉 Great summary of all the important points, and I loved your discussion about what SQL Script is good for, and the role of ABAP vs Java vs JavaScript in development of HANA applications. No surprise, and as usual I agree with you.

Had a good chuckle in the end when you mentioned the “touchy-feely” subject of “Design Thinking and Empathy”. You know, I’m not very good at these touchy-feely subjects, at least not when it comes to technology, but with you, a talk about these topics comes across as so credible, so believable, that even I will take a closer look. And since you know me well, that’s not something I will say easily.